Extension of the System Drive on a Windows 2003 Small Business Server
[Today's post comes to us courtesy of Nandan Sheth]
The first thing that needs to be kept in mind is the fact that extending the system drive is risky business, and not some thing we (as in the support team) recommend. The logical sequence of steps that need to be taken if we are running out of free space on the system drive is listed below:
1. Take a backup of the system drive along with the system state.
The backup of the system drive is a file level backup of the files stored on the system drive. Primarily, these are the files and folders under Documents and Settings, Program Files and the Windows directory.
The system state backup backs up the settings on the system. The settings that are backed up are:
- The registry
- The Active Directory
- COM settings
- Group Policy settings
- Boot files
2. Once we have this backup, we should wipe out the system drive and reconfigure the same, or install a new, larger drive to install the system on.
3. After installing the new drive, we install the Operating System.
4. After the Operating system has been installed, reboot the server into the directory services restore mode, and restore the system drive as well as the system state.
5. This will bring the system to the same state it was in, when we reached a condition of low disk space on the system.
As a support team, we usually stick with this advice. The primary reason in doing so is the fact that if you right click your system drive through the Disk Manager console, you don’t get the option to extend the system drive:
Also, Windows 2003 (Standard, Enterprise, or SBS) are shipped with diskpart.exe as the default disk partitioning tool. If you try to extend the system partition using diskpart.exe, you would receive errors. Please see the articles below for more information in regards to system drive extension using diskpart.exe:
https://support.microsoft.com/kb/325590/en-gb
https://support.microsoft.com/kb/886986/en-gb
For all the functions you can perform using diskpart.exe, please view the link below:
The bottom line here is, extending the system partition is not recommended, and is not a supported troubleshooting option.